Elizabeth Hand - Winterlong

Here in a high curved recess stood an altar. Small shelves cut into the elaborate marble had once held icons of some sort, like those I had seen elsewhere in the Crypt Church. But the statues were gone now. In their place stood clumsily made dolls of bone and fur, leaning haphazardly against the heavy candlesticks. Dripping tallow threatened to set one of these pathetic images afire. I took candle in one hand and icon in the other, holding the taper to regard it more closely. A kind of animal, or a man with an animal’s head. Blank eyes scratched in a smoothed piece of bone and colored with dirt or blood. The whole thing held together with wisps of straw and fur and hair. I shuddered and replaced it in a shallow alcove where it was in no danger of catching fire.

Beside these little creatures I found offerings of bones wrapped in neat bundles, and smaller figures made of braided human hair. Other things as well, oddments and bijoux that might have fallen from a hundred hidden pockets. A braided riband, its russet and silver brocade marking it as a Paphian’s favor from some curator. A smooth round marble that, when I investigated, proved to be a prosthetic eye: its solid black core responding to the warmth of my hand and dilating as it sought to focus upon me. There was even an untidy bouquet of shrunken blossoms like desiccated human hands, gathered who knows where—beneath the Botanists’ glass domes, or within the shadows of the Narrow Forest, or by the dank green shores of the river. Perhaps the flowers had clutched and fought as they were plucked from the damp earth, to be brought here and forgotten. But everything was child-sized, toylike, including the nosegay of dead blossoms: some small fist had held them last. I turned away suddenly, the pain in my stomach that had begun as hunger now knotting itself into queasiness. A black fear gripped me: that I had been brought here as just another offering, another odd yet lovely thing stolen from the dead and left to languish here.

“Raphael. You are awake—”

I whirled to see a spidery figure standing behind the iron grille. Clean white garments covered his limbs, and he held a lantern above his head. Beside him slunk a hunched form. I heard the clatter of keys and then Dr. Silverthorn’s command, “Put the food there and leave us.”

The gate swung inward. The hunched figure placed something on the floor. It made a soft guttural sound, then slipped into the darkness. When Dr. Silverthorn hung the lantern from a corner of the gate I saw that the door; remained open.

“You are not a prisoner,” he said, bowing his head in greeting. It could not have been more than a day since had last seen him, but already the contagion had progressed. His fine ointments did little now but cover the soft globe of bone and skull with a sheen of gold. “You are here so that the lazars will not disturb your rest. They fear this place, and will not visit it unless Tast’annin forces them to.” His mouth opened wider in the goblin grin that was all that remained of his smile. “This was called the Children’s; Chapel, once.” He indicated the objects on the floor. “That is food for you: just bread and water and some dried grapes, I’m afraid. Mostly they eat human flesh here, and die from it: that is not fit nourishment and I will not offer it to you.”

I fell onto the pitiful repast like a starved animal. When I finished I turned back to my visitor. He had not moved from his place just outside the gate, and seemed to wait almost shyly for me to invite him in.

“Won’t you sit?” I asked, pointing first to a chair and then to my pallet.

“No, thank you.” His voice a harsh whistling sound grating against bare bones as it sought to escape him. The white robes stirred as his breath leaked from lungs and throat. “It is too painful for me to sit now. It has penetrated my marrow. Better to pace and let the virus move with me, exhaust it so that it may sleep later and give me peace.” His breath erupted into hiccuping gasps, and he dropped his black bag on the floor between us. “If you will Raphael …”

I found the vial and handed him a restorative. A very few yellow capsules remained. I averted my eyes from the spectacle of this cadaver attempting to gulp the pill waited several minutes until his breathing slowed and I heard the clicking of his feet upon the floor. “Thank you,”’ he rasped.

I turned back to him. “Do I have an audience with the Consolation of the Dead?” I asked bitterly. “Or have you come to tell me that Death himself awaits me even now?”’

“He will not kill you, Raphael. At least not yet. And yes: you are to meet with him this morning.”

Guttering candlelight flared in his eyesockets. For an instant shadows fleshed the solemn curves of his skull so that I had a glimpse of what he had been a month earlier: a young man, slender, with quick fey motions and eyes that were deep-set rather than sunk into gaunt hollows. When he stepped closer to the glowing altar the vision was gone; I continued my conversation with a spectre clad in pale cerements.

“I have come to bring you to him, and because I am lonely and curious—you see, I am still a man!—I would know more of you before I die; and I want to warn you.”

I nodded and settled myself on a chair, leaving him to pace as he spoke. Occasionally he paused to pass trembling fingers across his face, as though to reassure himself that something still remained there of his corporeal being.

“You said you knew of your sister? The empath Wendy Wanders?”

“No,” I said. “Only that I had a sister; Doctor Foster and Gower Miramar told me that. It was no secret to us. I assumed she was dead.”

“She is not. She lives; at least she lived to escape from the Human Engineering Laboratory two months ago, assisted by a Medical Aide named Justice Saint- Alaban. A Paphian: do you know him?”

I pried a splinter from the bottom of my chair and began to clean my fingernails with it. I believed he spoke nonsense. Yet his words disturbed me if only because they reminded me of Doctor Foster’s tales, the stories he had told us at Semhane and The Glorious and Winterlong, where among the lashing tails of aardmen and the Gray Mayor’s crimson eyes flitted this other shape, small and wailing and with blood threading from her temples: my nameless twin sold to the Ascendants. “My House does not often consort with Saint-Alabans. They are heretics. I am not surprised one served the Ascendants.”

“Well, he did: served us rather well until he ran away with our prized madcap.” A hooting gasp that might have been laughter as he reached the altar and stopped to stare at its offerings.

“A thieving Saint-Alaban. Well, that doesn’t surprise me either,” I said. But it was curious, to think of a Saint-Alaban among the Ascendants; to think of any Paphian among the Ascendants. I wished I had questioned Ketura more carefully about her meetings with them during her time outside. “But they must be dead by now—”

“I told you: they are not.” Click of his bony feet upon the floor as he began to pace again. He paused to lean against one of the ancient chairs. “Have you heard of a troupe of actors in this City?”

“Many Paphians perform. I acted in masques all the time.” I winced as the splinter dug too deeply beneath my thumb, flicked away the mite of wood, and glanced up at my visitor. “Our great festivals are masques—”

He tapped his foot impatiently. “No. These were traveling Players, they lived in the ruins of a theatrical library and performed ancient plays. They had among them a trained monkey that could speak—”

I nodded and sat back hard in my chair, excited by the sudden memory of bright and archaic costumes, a beast that recited poetry like a courtesan.